'Fable: The Journey' interview: Lionhead talks Kinect, Milo and more

Revealed at last year's E3 Expo in Los Angeles, details of Kinect adventure Fable: The Journey have been thin on the ground in the months since its unveiling.

Both the game and its team have undergone many changes in the past year, with Peter Molyneux leaving Lionhead Studios for pastures new and the development team experimenting with many different gameplay styles and control schemes.

Digital Spy spoke to creative director Gary Carr about the journey his team have taken with Kinect, what makes the latest Fable title so unique and how he hopes to attract a new audience and appease long-term fans.

The game was initially perceived to be an on-rails shooter, which, when compared to traditional Fable games might seem a little shallow and short-lived. How do you describe it?

"No, no, this is the biggest thing we've ever made. Seriously, I don't want to sound like I'm over hyping it, but our biggest problem was that we put you on this thing that moves at 30mph, so we had to build this massive world, and actually, the story exploded the game. We started writing early on with our team and ended up writing more and more stuff.

"We went to E3 last year with a very early version of the game - probably too early to be honest. We wanted to show off everything that we'd done, and people were expecting a fully-fledged game, and we weren't quite there yet. The idea with this game is to do what Kinect does well, and I think you'll see that when you play. None of us are controller vs. Kinect, we're developers.

"I've been doing this for so long, I started making games on keyboards, through to joysticks, joypads, motion controls and Kinect. They're just new ways to develop genres.

"Genres are developed out of interfaces into games. So when people ask whether the game is on rails, we're just developers and we're trying to design things with new technologies that are interesting and unique to the interface. We've done things that work brilliantly with Kinect and avoided things that don't."

You mentioned the size of the world, how big is it?

"Massive. At E3 last year I got my maths wrong, I said it was 300 miles of track, but it's way, way, way more than that. We've had a team, an army of people working on the game, and instead of writing an engine, we've used Unreal, which just works. Myself, the artists and designers just started building in it, and it just got bigger and bigger and bigger. It needs to feel like a journey, and it feels much more like a movie."

How does it feel like a movie?

"Kinect is more physical, so we need to carry players through during the moments when we need you [to] rest. The story allows us to do that, it's an important device to make sure that you're engaged and not fatigued. The Japanese do storytelling brilliantly, some of the Final Fantasy games, for example. We're never that brave in the West, so I just felt like this was a great opportunity to tell an engaging story and give players a rest."

"We've literally tried everything. We've tried using you as the controller... doesn't work. We've had you running around and jumping up and down off your seat, before settling down to mechanics that I think work. We've done this through extensive user research, and I used to be quite anti-user research, but you need to do it for a game like this, because people can be quite uncoordinated.

"We've got to machine learn our game for every different party. Some people are more physical than others. Everything from disability to people who are exaggerated or understated, all of these things have to be considered when making a Kinect game."

How difficult is that?

"Very. But this is a community of people who are pioneering to solve these problems. The more data we can gather for different types of physicality, mannerisms and movements, the more the technology can normalise that information and make good of it.

"And actually, you know, if you do get the occasional false positive or glitch, that's not always a bad thing, because it's about finding the experience. In the real world you don't suddenly know how to throw a javelin or drive a car. This allows you to find the experience, which is exciting because you're doing something that isn't just pre-mapped to a controller."

"Well, it's been difficult, because there haven't been many that are designed for the long play, for the core audience. My kids love Kinect, my wife loves Kinect, but for very different reasons than what we're trying to make.

"We set ourselves the challenge of making something that works within the Fable universe. Therefore, people expect it to be a longer game, have depth, variety and deep mechanics, and I think we've done that."

Are there any other ways in which it stands out from other Kinect releases?

"I hate the term 'stand out', because it makes it sound like we're saying that we're better than other games. It stands aside because we're very much making a play on you being the interface. There's no onscreen avatar, no representation.

"We're encouraging you to feel like you're throwing things into the world, the TV is a window. We've built this universe over the past ten years, but I really wanted you to feel more immersed."

"I think that magic is something that doesn't map to a controller very well. To feel magical you want to physically play with this material. Everybody's had dreams and fantasies in their life about these sorts of things. From day one, that was our unique selling point.

"Also, just the feeling of context, being able to stroke the horse, tend to its injuries and touch things in the world is one of those leaps we try to make at Lionhead every now and then. We did it in Milo to some degree and also with the dog in Fable. We need to use these technologies and context to support it, otherwise you always feel distant from it."

You mentioned Milo, did you draw on that much when making Fable: The Journey?

"Being able to sit down and play this game came directly from Milo and the fact that there are voice commands in there is also from the Milo tech. We've been in the Kinect space since 2008.

"There were ten dev kits and we had three of them. Milo was just this incredible project to see what it could do, our guinea pig. It has all of these things going on inside it, being able to hear you and see you. We always had the ambition to make it into a game, obviously, but we ended up taking all of the best bits from Milo and throwing them into Fable."

So it's been a long journey for the team then?

"Yeah. We didn't know what we were going to do with Milo, to be honest with you. It was a tech demo, but after we showed it at E3 it exploded and took on a life of its own. But I think ultimately we had to make something commercial, and I hate using that term, but we had this wonderful universe, this great IP, and we always wanted to do something with Fable and Kinect."

Will this appeal to both Fable fans and newcomers to the series?

"To a Fable fan they'll recognize it, but if you come to this game fresh you absolutely don't need to have played Fable before. We've totally stuck to the Fable back story, to the Fable bible.

"There are two big things that we explore in the game. One is to tell the story of Theresa, the other was what the Spire's all about. The real Fable fan will get that, but to a newbie it won't make a shot of difference, because it's telling a hero's story."

Fable: The Journey will release exclusively for Kinect on Xbox 360 later this year.